


euphemisms

by thir13enth



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, coran's backstory is so open to interpretation i just had to, introspective stuff, sad shit i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-27 00:51:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7596955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thir13enth/pseuds/thir13enth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He only speaks of happier things — even though his eyes have seen so much more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	euphemisms

**Author's Note:**

> cowritten with [dragonshost](http://dragonshost.tumblr.com), who thought she could make me cry with this potential coran headcanon.
> 
> hah. as if. i eat death with angst for breakfast. with black coffee.

He only speaks of the happier things — even though his eyes have seen so much more than just pretty rainbows and blue drop skies, shimmering comets, and galaxies of constellations in the clear space night.

He sees the Princess and the five new Paladins standing before him, now.

They’re all children — too young to fight a war started tens of thousands of years ago on a planet they have never seen and will never even hope to.

Coran was a relic of that time then even before he went to sleep, and ten thousand years later, he most certainly still is a relic of its haunting memories.

Sometimes the words slip from his lips. And sometimes the kids are inquisitive. They ask questions and they are relentless when he waves off their curiosity with his hand and replies with a non-answer that, smart as they are, they are fully aware  _ is _ a non-answer.

“Oh come  _ on,  _ Coran,” Lance groans when Coran avoids an interrogation after dinner. “You can’t just  _ say  _ something like ‘oh I once was a pilot for the general Altean air force’ and then just not tell us the rest? If you’re so old and wise, why don’t you prove it?”

“Excuse me, I am not _ old _ —”

— and so Lance hears the parts of the story that involve hard work — scrubbing the cryo-pods, calluses forming on young Coran’s hands, the shouting of his sergeant, and the value he’d learned in the labor. But alone, Coran remembers his sergeant’s face as the commander ordered his squad to safety at the cost of his own, and how later Coran had been the one to scout the wrecked starships to find his sergeant’s ship among the wreckage of war. 

Coran never did.

Coran doesn’t talk about the war, much. He leaves that to Allura, and it is a duty she seems to fall into easily.  So it’s not his job to remind her of even more sorrow, or to impose his own pain onto hers. She’s the princess. His superior officer. But she’s also still the round-faced little girl with berry stains on her favorite dress and flowers stuffed in her pockets.  She doesn’t need more heaped upon her slim shoulders.

At the time, Allura’s eyes were too young and innocent. 

He covered them so that she couldn’t see.

After all, no one deserves to live with those sights burned into their mind. No one deserves to live with the sounds of gurgling screams echoing in their ears nor the smell of fresh  _ fresh  _ iron bleeding into their nose — memories lurking like shadows when strolling down empty dark hallways in the castle ship, voices haunting between the drip-drops of the shower faucet, chills crawling up their spines in the middle of the night. 

No one deserves to carry any of the burdens of history alone.

But none of those children deserve to bear his burden for him, even if it would bring him some relief.  And the mice are horrible secret keepers.

And so Coran talks to himself. He can’t tell a soul but he can’t not say a word, so he talks to himself because then at least he feels like he’s sharing the stories with a confidante when he’s really just mumbling to himself in the mirror.

He repeats the same things over and over and over again, and sometimes he worries that he sounds like a broken tape recorder but he can barely come to terms with the fact that he  _ is  _ broken and that he is the  _ only  _ tape recorder left of what happened.

The people in his memories had lived. They were important. Ten thousand years had passed —  if he didn’t remember them, then who would? How they lived, how they spent their final moments, who they were, what their voices sounded like — the way they continued to live like they had a life a live when their life was not nearly worth living. They hadn’t deserved their fate — not the most innocent of babies, not the worst of criminals.

This is all he can do for them. This is all he can ever hope to do for them.

So every night, as he lays his head down on his pillow and attempts to fall asleep, he tells his own stories from his memories, recites everything from his own head. He does it even if it doesn’t make sense, even if he doesn’t want to hear it, even if he knows he doesn’t want to care.

He thinks that if he says the words for long enough, then he, at the very least, will never forget.


End file.
